The present specification generally relates to the field of transactional asynchronous electronic communication.
The use of the internet to promote and sell products has proliferated in recent years to the point where it has become a significant portion of retail sales. Commonly, users shop online using ecommerce portals, such as the website accessible at http://www.staples.com. Using these e-commerce portals, users can browse products by category, read reviews, add items to virtual shopping cart, and proceed through the checkout process where the user inputs payment and delivery information and consummates the transaction.
However, with the increasing popularity of mobile devices that have limited screen sizes, there is a need for online retailers to adapt their shopping applications to those devices. Otherwise, customers are left with a cumbersome shopping experience that requires users to interact with layouts, buttons, links, etc., of websites which are designed for larger size screens that are commonly found on desktops and laptops and not for considerably smaller screens. Additionally, inputting information on these sites requires a considerable amount of typing using a soft QWERTY keyboard that is often difficult to use, which results in the users typing more typos that usual and resorting to correcting those typos with less-than-optimal tools. These frustrating customer experiences usually result in lower conversion rates because of the amount of time and effort it takes to consummate the transaction.
Some e-commerce solutions use messaging, such as SMS messaging, to receive products manually typed using a letter-script (e.g., Latin script) keyboard by the user. These solutions then use Natural Language processing or personnel to converse with the end user to determine the exact product(s) the user wants to purchase. However, these solutions have not been widely adopted because they are too time consuming—it takes too much time to textually explain and clarify what the products they want so the correct products get ordered. In that amount of time, the user could have purchased the product(s) using a conventional cart-based web site flow.
Further, customers increasingly expect that online shopping applications will surface relevant results and provide a satisfying and efficient shopping experience. This also applies to post-sale flows like customer support and returns. Current solutions are often not customer-centric, but instead require customers to submit information via a web form and then wait days or weeks for assistance. While some sites provide a real-time chat experience, it is not seamlessly integrated with the customer's purchase experience nor is it effective at preserving prior correspondence between the customer and customer support. As a result, the customer typically has to repeat all of the details of the problem he/she is experience over again during a subsequent support session. This leaves the customer feeling uncared for and can ultimately lead to the loss of that customer.
Thus, there is a need for a new, efficient digital user experience that surfaces virtual products in a natural way and allows for an expedient and low-friction virtual product selection and checkout process, as well as a seamless post-purchase experience.